Jessica Zhang

Qingfeng Sun, Yujing Wang, Can Xu et al.

Responsing with image has been recognized as an important capability for an intelligent conversational agent. Yet existing works only focus on exploring the multimodal dialogue models which depend on retrieval-based methods, but neglecting generation methods. To fill in the gaps, we first present a multimodal dialogue generation model, which takes the dialogue history as input, then generates a textual sequence or an image as response. Learning such a model often requires multimodal dialogues containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. Motivated by the challenge in practice, we consider multimodal dialogue generation under a natural assumption that only limited training examples are available. In such a low-resource setting, we devise a novel conversational agent, Divter, in order to isolate parameters that depend on multimodal dialogues from the entire generation model. By this means, the major part of the model can be learned from a large number of text-only dialogues and text-image pairs respectively, then the whole parameters can be well fitted using the limited training examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art results in both automatic and human evaluation, and can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses.

Eric Chen, Justin Chu, Jessica Zhang et al.

Short-read DNA sequencing instruments can yield over 1e+12 bases per run, typically composed of reads 150 bases long. Despite this high throughput, de novo assembly algorithms have difficulty reconstructing contiguous genome sequences using short reads due to both repetitive and difficult-to-sequence regions in these genomes. Some of the short read assembly challenges are mitigated by scaffolding assembled sequences using paired-end reads. However, unresolved sequences in these scaffolds appear as "gaps". Here, we introduce GapPredict, a tool that uses a character-level language model to predict unresolved nucleotides in scaffold gaps. We benchmarked GapPredict against the state-of-the-art gap-filling tool Sealer, and observed that the former can fill 65.6% of the sampled gaps that were left unfilled by the latter, demonstrating the practical utility of deep learning approaches to the gap-filling problem in genome sequence assembly.